Elsewhere on the net, a debate rages on - Older Vs Younger Programmers - Is there a Batch Vs Event Oriented Programming Mindset? Age discrimination is wrong, illegal here in the U.S (and may be so in other countries as well) and nobody should be denied their job because of their age. On the other hand, businesses need certain skillsets and need to hire people with those skillets to get their job done. On another note, many people claim that older programmers bring certain skills with them - Knowledge of business and more importantly for me, knowledge about what works in the real world and what does not. There are some who claim that older programmers trained in languages like COBOL cannot easily make the transition from Batch Oriented (master-transaction) models of programming to event-oriented programming. That's a tough call to make for employers and employees alike! If I know one thing, it is that the rate of change in Computer Science/ Technology is much faster than in other engineering fields like say Automotive or Civil Engineering. If you are out of school for five years, go check out the classes, languages, approaches, tools that your own school uses and teaches. You will be astounded at how much you don't know unless you diligently keep up by joining such organizations such as IEEE and ACM and keep up somewhat! But who has the time when you have a family, soccer and basketball practice you need to take your kids to, not to speak up of increasing pressures and shortage of time at work? So you do stand to become outdated but if you have been observant at work, you have learned other valuable lessons such as how Murphy's Law works, how to separate what you hear and what it means when you understand office politics and how to realistically estimate project durations. It is also true that younger generations getting the same degree as yours invariably learn better tools and programming languages. There is nothing that makes me cringe than to hear a programmer say "Oh. That's nothing new. We used to do that with -Insert your Favorite Tool or Programming Language-". There I see a recruit for the mindless programming and operating system religions right away. Issues of programmability, maintainability, cheaper and faster processors, availability of cheap memory are all constantly redefining what the right approach to a software development project should be. A programmer that's used to writing very tight efficient code ALL the time so that they can squeeze in more speed in less memory is anachronistic when they do not matter that much, given the speed of the processors. In any case readability and maintainability cost much much more these days than the savings you effect by writing unreadable but very efficient code. It might be better to get the functionality right first and speed up only the parts of the code that get executed most often. In an age where you can throw more Linux boxes at a problem, the approach above may be the right one if throwing Linux boxes will solve the scalability problem. Younger programmers also do not know what is NOT possible and make them possible anyway! Without new ways of thinking about something, insights, discoveries, inventions and innovation are all not possible. And your prosperity is directly tied to innovation, make no mistake about it. You can get all the outsourcing and exports you want but sooner or later you will be displaced by cheaper labor next door. Innovation will be the only thing that will make other countries spend their money with you year after year! And younger people are willing to try out new things even if they are not 100% there. It's no surprise that they are more comfortable with event oriented programming as we see with most applications these days and online transaction systems. So is it really Batch Vs Event-Oriented programming, younger vs older programmers? Yes, But. Older programmers' need to keep an open mind about anything new that comes along and not ignore them at their own peril. Many of the new stuff may not work as you rightly guessed given your experience but the few that work will put you out of the marketplace. That's not very easy when you have committments and a life outside work to lead. More importantly they should be thinking of making their experience, business and project management skills compensate for what they lack in technical skills. Career planning is never more important than in technology.